Mission: Impossible goes out with a whimper instead of a bang with The Final Reckoning

When Tom Cruise brought the Mission: Impossible franchise to the big screen in 1996, he could do no wrong. 

A few months away from Jerry Maguire and coming off a streak of box office hits, no one could touch Tom Cruise.

Over the next 30 years, the star system that fed a megastar like Tom Cruise slowly dissipated and made way for the franchise age.

There has always been a charm to the Mission: Impossible franchise, an analogue franchise in a world of high-tech, a star-driven vehicle in an era of superhero team-ups.

Directors like Brian De Palma, John Woo and Brad Bird were hired as flavour of the month auteurs by Cruise, but ever since 2015’s Rogue Nation, the only man Cruise has trusted is one Christopher McQuarrie.

Their first attempt, the aforementioned Rogue Nation, did Bond better than Bond and 2018’s Fallout is a peak for the franchise.

2022’s Top Gun: Maverick put Cruise back on top and paved the way for yet another decade of Cruise megastardom.

But it didn’t quite pan out that way.

2023’s Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (which has since dropped the Part One title), while still being one of the franchise’s best entries, was beset by pandemic-relayed delays and Chris McQuarrie, a writer/director who usually has such a tight control over his stories, writing by the seat of his pants.

In his multi-hour monographs with Empire Magazine, it becomes clear that Cruise trusts McQuarrie because he is the only filmmaker who can reach into Tom Cruise’s mind and extract the good stuff.

For over a decade, the partnership worked like Thierry Henry and Dennis Bergkamp, now it’s more akin to Christopher Nkunku and Enzo Fernández.

There is a shagginess to Dead Reckoning that makes it weaker than other entries in the franchise and feels like it’s built around the big set-pieces as opposed to the other way around in other movies.

The Final Reckoning, we are sad to report, continues this trend and, worse still, suddenly decides that plot points from previous movies are now important.

The beauty of the franchise up until now was that the movies were largely self-contained and you didn’t need to have seen the other movies to enjoy it; of course, it helped to know the character dynamics, but by and large you could watch one of the movies on TV and dip in and out.

During the Daniel Craig era of James Bond, the franchise broke one of its key rules by trying to build a mythology and an ongoing plotline while Mission: Impossible ran rings around it.

Eight movies in, Mission: Impossible has decided to go by playground logic; they are now making the rules up on the fly, and it is maddening.

The Final Reckoning is a film of two halves; the first half is all set up, and the second half is all payoff.

In this case, the first half is more like when Brazil got battered by Germany in the 2014 World Cup semi-final.

For a film with a $400 million dollar budget, it has script issues that wouldn’t fly in a student film, let alone a studio tentpole like this one.

At the end of the 2023 movie, The Entity, an evil AI, looks poised to take over the world, and Ethan Hunt’s greatest adversary yet, Gabriel, gets away.

Mistake number one of the movie: it has to tie up the loose ends from the last movie, something the franchise has never done before.

In the last few weeks alone, Marvel seems to be back on track with Thunderbolts because it didn’t require viewers to have seen 18 other movies, three TV shows, complete a master’s thesis and conduct a 6-week language course to understand it; they show up and buy the ticket.

Franchises aren’t a bad thing necessarily, but in the case of Mission: Impossible, an attempt to create an overarching, continuing narrative this late into the game ruins what makes the films so great to begin with.

We buy a ticket to see Tom Cruise defy death time and time again because we know it doesn’t require homework; now Final Reckoning is relying on you remembering plot details from a movie you might have seen once back in 2006.

While Ethan Hunt has become a character we’ve come to know and love, his supporting cast has become just as important to the formula.

McQuarrie takes a gamble that in movie eight, we don’t want to see Ethan Hunt working with his friends and that is yet another crucial mistake the movie makes.

So many of the franchise’s greatest hits involve him playing off Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson (whose absence this time around is sorely felt), Vanessa Kirby (also MIA) or some incredibly elaborate business involving a mask.

Yet again, we are deprived of what makes the series great.

The big set-pieces are still there, but they are given away in the trailer again; the big submarine set-piece is classic franchise stuff while a third act chase involving propeller planes has a fun Buster Keaton meets Jackass feeling to it.

Yes, a franchise needs to evolve, it can’t just be the same thing over and over again, but the film stopping dead to relitigate a minor plot point from a previous film and denying us the chemistry and interplay between the beloved characters is a silly mistake you’d think wouldn’t have made it past the first round of script revisions.

McQuarrie is usually a great screenwriter – he won an Oscar for writing The Usual Suspects and his writing is a big part of why Top Gun: Maverick was so successful – but like Alex Garland, when he pulls double duty as writer and director he isn’t bringing his A-game to both disciplines.

It is hard to believe that the same man who made Fallout such a brilliant film in 2018 would make so many sloppy mistakes on a film of this scope and calibre.

If a review of a Mission: Impossible movie mentions that the movie is too long and it could have cut an hour, something has gone horribly wrong.

Brian De Palma’s 1996 original was a full hour shorter than what is presented to us in 2025; there is nothing in this new movie that is as iconic as poor Emilio Estevez getting crushed in the lift.

The door is left open for more entries – it’s a Tom Cruise movie, there’s no way he’s letting his baby go – but now might be the time to put the franchise on ice for a while.

Or at the very least, put Limp Bizkit back on the soundtrack.